Can Markkanen take a step as a scorer? Bookies — and our Mark Russell Pereira — wonder. (Kyusung Gong via sltrib.com)
Unlike last year, I find myself with no tangible thoughts or strong feelings about the Utah Jazz as an on-court product. The Jazz are a fleeting, mild curiosity for much of the NBA cognoscenti; a rebuilding team with precisely zero high-ceiling superstar talent is not a team worth tuning into. Utah’s wide smattering of okay-to-good players probably makes for surprisingly competitive basketball more often than not, but nobody cares enough about Collin Sexton or Lauri Markkanen to suffer through the awful redesign (of the team or its uniforms) on a regular basis.
But our friends in Las Vegas are always looking for reasons to pay attention to every team. Or are they?
The sportsbooks are always going to try to find ways around the edges to grab some money from fans and gamblers. The funny thing about this year’s Jazz, though, is that without that aforementioned top-end talent, or even curious potential, it’s actually really hard to find sportsbooks that have relevant Jazzman stat lines to bet on for season-long futures bets. This is compounded by the broad questions as to what new coach Will Hardy’s rotation will look like. Sportsbooks’ unwillingness to put Jazz player props up tells me that Las Vegas thinks of the Jazz much like the rest of us: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We’re not completely without Jazz betting options, though. The standard stuff (win totals, etc.) still exists, and we also have some weird ones I found underneath some rocks. Last year I provided some reactions as to where my bets would be, but I won’t be doing that this year. Not because I performed so spectacularly awful last year1 but because a lot of these are so weird and wacky that it’s more fun to talk about the scenarios that lead to them being winning bets than actually feeling good about the odds. Once you get into odds over +1000 we’re in some pretty sketchy territory as it is.
I won’t tell you what to do with your money though! Lets get to it2.
(Over: -105; Under: -105)
The Jazz will win an incredibly low amount of games from what we’re accustomed to over the past, um, 35 years, but 23 wins is still fairly ridiculous. ESPN columnist Kevin Pelton mentioned recently that ~70% of teams with preseason win total estimates of 25 or fewer ended up going over. I think Utah is a fair bet to follow that trend.
The team simply has too many actual NBA players. When you look at rosters of some of the truly awful 20-win teams of the past ten years, they give hundreds of minutes to dudes you’ve never heard of and many of which don’t play in the NBA anymore. Utah’s bottom-5 of Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Ochai Agbaji, Leandro Bolmaro, Simone Fontecchio, and Udoka Azubuike is very bad and not good, but it still might be a tier above the lowest-end garbage that the Spurs, Pacers (especially once they trade Myles Turner and/or Buddy Hield) and Thunder can trot out. I’m putting the Jazz as a comfortable over—something like 28 or 29 wins.
If the Jazz go under 23 wins, they will need to get absolutely crushed during the first three months of the season while they still play their best veteran talent like Mike Conley and Kelly Olynyk. The incredibly difficult first segment of Utah’s season might oblige that.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Weeeeeell….maybe?
Look, I’m not exactly cheering for this to happen, but if it does, it means something is going right for the Jazz. And sure, whatever is going “right” might not be better than drafting Victor Wembanyama, but only one team is getting that dude. The things going “right” for Utah to even remotely sniff the playoffs is some multiple of (a) Hardy coaching his ass off, (b) Markkanen and Sexton taking a wild leap into All-Star consideration, (c) Agbaji and Walker Kessler providing immediate positive impact as rookies, and/or (d) something pops among the role players like Fontecchio or Alexander-Walker.
If at least three of those things happen, wouldn’t you still feel pretty great about where the Jazz are in 2023 and beyond, as the trove of acquired draft picks start coming due? I would.
This might happen by accident. The Thunder, Rockets, and Spurs are all (also) going to intentionally lose. The Jazz would just have to beat out just two more teams to make the play-in tournament. The Kings will roll out their best squad in years, but still don’t have enough talent to wash off the lingering Kings smell (which smells mysteriously similar to the slot machine floor of an old Maloof casino). A good team in the West is going to have injury issues and fold on the season. The Lakers don’t instill confidence.
The Jazz’s trajectory points firmly downward, but I’m really not sure they have enough bad talent and coaching to comfortably live in the basement all year. I could see the Jazz accidentally winning 33 games and that remarkably being good enough for a 10-seed. +1200 isn’t steep enough for me, though. +1200 means “sort of plausible” and we need “weirdly possible.”
Otherwise known as “WHO WILL LOSE THE TANK-OFF?”
As I’ve hinted above, the Jazz will start out a half-tier above the Rockets, Thunder, and Spurs, and probably equal with the Pacers before they jettison Turner and Hield. The Rockets’ defense will still be unfathomably bad, and their offensive talent still probably doesn’t get them above 22nd in offense. Oklahoma City seems content letting Shai Gilgeous-Alexander miss however many games he wants, and still have so, so few good players on the roster. The Spurs are loaded with weird former late-first round draft picks with no actual evidence if they are quality players, and the likes of Keldon Johnson, Devin Vassell, and Jakob Poeltl ain’t carrying them to success. The Pacers are similarly situated to the Spurs, only with a premier talent running the show in Tyrese Halliburton.
The Jazz have the highest odds (read: least likely) to be the best of these flotsam five, and I think there is some value there. The funny disconnect is that the Rockets, Thunder, and Spurs all have higher odds than Utah to make the play-in, but lower odds to beat out Utah in this pseudo-parlay. I think that shows the confusion in Las Vegas about the Jazz: will be they be spectacularly terrible, or kind of badly decent?
A lot of Jazz fans have pretty fond memories of the 2003-04 Utah Jazz, in which Jerry Sloan coached a fledgling Utah Jazz squad—led by Andrei Kirilenko and Raja Bell—to 42 wins. That squad, projected to win 25.5 games, was supposed to be terrible on paper but Sloan got them a game away from an unfathomable playoff appearance. It earned Sloan a narrow 2nd-place finish in Coach of the Year voting3.
Sloan probably benefited a touch from media respect of his great Stockton/Malone years in which he never won Coach of the Year, and Hardy will receive no such tacit admiration. But the top factor in Coach of the Year award narrative is “bad team is actually good”. If you feel that the Jazz have way better playoff chances than most believe, then you might as well toss money into the Coach of the Year bucket.
Oh yeah, time to get into the real sicko shit. Props (pun intended) to PointsBet for satisfying my inner degenerate with these weird prop bets, because I am very ready to lose some money.
Not here, though. Agbaji projects to be a fairly decent piece for an NBA team. The rookie swingman is a lock to be a decent shooter and appears to competently defend one-on-one. Nobody should trust him to dribble or create for others right now, so he’ll operate purely as a dependent threat. It doesn’t even appear that Agbaji will factor into the Utah rotation, at least to start the season.
This doesn’t profile as a player who will be able to jack up a ton of threes in the Utah offense. Agbaji might get there at the end of the year, but for a season-long projection he’s just not going to make as many as Keegan Murray (+350), Jabari Smith (+400), or even Bennedict Mathurin (+450), who will all have license to fire away from the jump. The only way Agbaji factors into this is if Conley, Malik Beasley, Rudy Gay, and Talen Horton-Tucker all find themselves simultaneously hurt or traded, opening up a sudden 35 minute role for Agbaji. That’s too weird of a scenario to rest on for a mere +1000 prize.
Kessler actually has longer odds than Paolo Banchero (+200), Murray (+250), and Smith (+275). And while those guys will all get more minutes than Kessler, particularly at the beginning of the season, it’s not clear how their rebounding will translate to the NBA.
We’ve already seen Kessler rebound (and generally play really well) in the preseason. Kessler will definitely be in the rotation, and if he can stay on the floor (i.e., not get in foul trouble), I think he could average 11-plus rebounds in February onwards as a starting center. If he rebounds enough in this early stretch of the season while competing for minutes, he could eke out an 8.5-9.5 average that projects higher than his forward competition. I like +400 for this.
Watch out for Jalen Duren (+500) in Detroit on this mark as well if the frontcourt rotation thins out.
I’m just chortling to myself at the idea of Walker Kessler leading all rookies in scoring and what that would actually look like on the floor. Somebody should try doing this in NBA 2K.
I searched everywhere for individual player props for the Jazz and this is the only stuff I could find4.
Obviously these are heavy on Sexton, so let’s start with him. I just don’t see a path forward to a huge scoring year for Sexton—the minutes and shot attempts just won’t be there to get up to 25 points. You might point to his really nice scoring season in 2020-21 (24.3 PPG), but he was afforded 18.4 field goal attempts and 35.3 minutes per game for a completely barren Cleveland backcourt. Sexton is coming off a major injury this year, and there are a surprising amount of mouths to feed in Utah for shot attempts. It’s also not even clear if he’ll start.
Of course, if the Jazz make the playoffs (they won’t), magic has to come from somewhere. If you earnestly believe that a playoff run is plausible, then maybe Sexton finds his way to being a star. Hard pass for me.
On the other hand, I have a great feeling about Markkanen racking up tons of counting stats. In his second season for a dump Chicago Bulls team (Ryan Arcidiacono was 2nd on that team in minutes), Markkanen averaged 18.7 PPG and 9.0 RPG in 32.3 minutes. His minutes (and rebounds) have decreased from there as the Bulls formed a (marginally) better team, and then formed part of a frontcourt logjam in Cleveland alongside Kevin Love, Evan Mobley, and Jarrett Allen. That decrease in minutes masks how much improvement Markkanen has made in his game (pretty much exclusively on offense, to be fair). Markkanen has been Utah’s best player in preseason, and I see a very plausible path to 20 PPG as Utah’s best offensive player.
Getting those 9 rebounds will be way tougher. Markkanen is never going to be the sole big man on the floor, and it appears that Hardy will roll out Markkanen with rebounding extraordinaire Jarred Vanderbilt and Olynyk at the same time. Markkanen probably has the skill to inhale enough ballboards with his expected minutes, but he needs a firmer path towards frontcourt exclusivity like he had in that lone Chicago year for that 9 RPG to hit. +1200 isn’t enticing enough to go for it. But I do love his overall outlook for the season, so…
Aside from Markkanen, these are all totally worthless odds not worth paying attention to, but I wanted to include them for posterity. And Markkanen at +7000 is obviously a very stupid bet as well. But what separates him from the other Jazz candidates, for me, is that there’s a narrative where he ends up on a bunch of ballots for Most Improved Player. An overall skill leap from Markkanen is possible and if he ends up scoring more than 24 PPG (again, focal point of the offense) for a Jazz team finding itself around 38 to 40 wins, he’s going to attract a lot of voting attention.
A great year from Markkanen would really shake the brains of NBA enthusiasts who largely think of Markkanen as a decent, but not very great, player. A drastic reframing of what the public generally thinks of Markkanen is in play, and such instances lead to MIP votes. +7000 is just wild enough for the Jazz optimists to consider.
I, however, will be saving my money this year.
(Immediately looks up player props for Utah’s first game Wednesday night)
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